


On Call

by JangJaeYul



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Bittersweet, M/M, Phone Calls & Telephones, if you squint it's canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 04:30:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13356531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JangJaeYul/pseuds/JangJaeYul
Summary: Who do you call when you wake in the middle of the night?Luhan receives a call in the early hours of the morning from someone very familiar.





	On Call

At first he thinks it’s his morning alarm.

Luhan rolls over and smacks a hand against his phone, sliding his finger back and forth across the screen until it shuts up, then faceplants back into his pillow. It’s still too early, too dark outside, for him to have to get up.

It takes a second for it to register through the fog of sleep that his phone has not made the cheerful little chirp that tells him the alarm has been successfully snoozed.

It takes another second for him to realise that means it’s not an alarm.

Luhan rolls over and picks up the phone. No, it’s not an alarm. It’s a call, and he’s answered it.

Blinking against the aggressive light from the screen, he brings the phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

There’s no answer, and he thinks maybe his voice is too scratchy with sleep to be heard, so he clears his throat and tries again.

“Hello?”

There’s a shaky breath from the other end of the line.

_“Hi, Luhan.”_

Luhan rolls his head sideways onto the pillow. What time is it?

“Who is this?”

A moment of silence. Luhan debates going back to sleep while he waits for the other person to answer.

_“You don’t recognise my voice anymore.”_

Luhan squints his eyes open. Is this a voice he should recognise? What voices should he recognise at the moment?

Belatedly, it occurs to him that the other person is speaking Korean. In the same second, he realises that yes, he knows this voice very well.

“Minseok.” He pushes himself up off the pillow so he won’t fall asleep. “Minseok, is that you?”

_“You do remember me.”_

Luhan rubs a hand across his eyes and tries to reason this into reality. Forget the time, what _year_ is it?

“Of course, I- of course.”

There’s another beat of silence, while Luhan looks for words that encompass _how are you_ and _I miss you_ and _why have you called me in the middle of the night_.

Finally, he says, “what time is it?”

_“Three a.m. here,”_ Minseok replies. _“You were asleep.”_

“Yeah, it’s… it’s the middle of the night. Why are you up?”

_“I couldn’t sleep.”_

“That makes sense, I guess.”

Silence, again.

_“How have you been?”_

Luhan pauses. He doesn’t know where to start, where to begin to bridge the intervening years. Their lives have changed so much, and it’s not a matter of _fine_ or _busy_ or even _sleep-deprived, but in a good way_.

“Happy,” he says after a moment, then adds, “for the most part.”

_“I’m glad,”_ Minseok murmurs.

“What about you?”

Minseok gives a hum that might be considering, might be self-deprecating. _“More or less the same, I guess.”_

“That’s good.”

They sit in silence for a moment. If Luhan concentrates he can hear the faint sound of Minseok’s breath.

_“I woke up, and I… I missed you.”_

Luhan swallows around the sudden presence of his heart in his throat, but lets the admission hang in the air untouched, sensing Minseok has more to add.

_“So much. In a way I haven’t missed you since you- since ages ago. I couldn’t fall asleep, I couldn’t think about anything else… I just wanted to hear your voice.”_

Minseok sounds guilty, as if by calling he feels he has opened old wounds. Luhan closes his eyes and lets himself imagine they are less than this distance apart, less than three years of regret and longing and hardened hearts.

“I miss you too.”

There’s a sound that might be a sigh.

_“I’ve often wanted to call you,”_ Minseok admits. _“I got your number from Yixing a while ago, but I never… I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me.”_

“I always want to hear from you.” Luhan realises as he says it that it may be too much truth - but if not now, then when?

_“You might regret saying that,”_ Minseok says, _“if you give me permission to call you, I’ll end up doing it every week.”_

Luhan allows himself a full second to consider a world in which they can talk to each other that often.

“You can call me whenever you want,” he says, low and serious. “Anytime. Day or night - even at three in the morning.” Minseok laughs at that, and Luhan’s heart unclenches a little.

_“Okay.”_

“I mean it. For you, I’m always on call.”

Luhan hears the shake of Minseok’s breath against the receiver.

_“Thank you, Luhan.”_

It sounds like the beginning of a goodbye, but Luhan can’t let go of him yet, so he pushes one further.

“I’ll never stop caring about you, you know.”

For a moment, Minseok does not respond. When he does, his voice is soft.

_“I know.”_

He sounds like he might be on the verge of tears, so Luhan holds back the sudden press of words in his throat. He has told Minseok everything already, a thousand times over. It is enough now to remind him that it is all still true.

_“I should let you get back to sleep,”_ Minseok says.

“I don’t have to get up until seven,” Luhan tells him, because if it’s going to be another three years before they speak again then he’s going to make the most of every second available to him.

_“My schedule starts at six,”_ Minseok sighs. _“And I really do need the sleep. I’m so tired I have double eyelids.”_

Luhan can’t help but laugh at that.

“Okay,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

_“Yeah. You too.”_

Luhan hesitates, then blurts out, “I love you.”

There’s a tiny intake of breath from the other end of the line.

_“I love you too, Lu-ge.”_

Luhan closes his eyes. That name has never felt right from anyone else.

“Goodnight, Minseok.”

_“Goodnight, Luhan.”_

Luhan waits until Minseok hangs up, then lets his hand fall into his lap. His phone screen dims and eventually switches off, but Luhan holds himself in that moment, that space where Minseok is a breath away and speaking life back into Luhan’s heart. He smiles.

Before he falls asleep, he saves Minseok’s number so that when he wakes up he will know whether or not it was all a dream.

As he snuggles back down into his pillow, he allows himself the faintest glimmer of hope that Minseok really will call him again. That maybe they can start to bridge the divide.

That maybe their story doesn’t have to end.


End file.
